Inhibition and Production of Anger Cost More: Evidence From an ERP Study on the Production and Switch of Voluntary Facial Emotional Expression

Humans need to flexibly produce or switch different facial emotional expressions to meet social communication need. However, little is known about the control of voluntary facial emotional expression. We investigated the production and switch of facial expressions of happiness and anger in a response-priming task of 23 Chinese female university students and recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Results revealed that a frontal-central P2 component demonstrated greater positivity in the invalidly cued condition compared with the validly cued condition. Comparing the two facial emotional expressions, data from the contingent negative variation (CNV) component revealed that happiness and anger did not differ in the motor preparation phase. While data from N2 and P3 showed that switching from anger to happiness elicited larger N2 amplitudes than switching from happiness to anger and switching from happiness to anger elicited larger P3 than switching from anger to happiness. The results revealed that in invalidly cued condition, the inhibition (N2) and reprogramming (P3) cost of anger was greater than that of happiness. The findings indicated that during the switching process, both the inhibition and the reprogramming of anger cost more processing resources than those of happiness.